The ghost fishing gear tile does not track individual net losses at sea in real time. It applies a conservative global estimate of 100,000 metric tons of fishing gear lost annually and spreads that total evenly across the calendar year.
How the counter works
- Start with 100,000 metric tons per year.
- Measure how much of the current calendar year has elapsed.
- Display that fraction of the annual total, updating continuously.
Losses spike with storms, snags, and illegal dumping. Our counter assumes a steady average pace so the scale is easy to read at a glance.
Where 100,000 tons comes from
You may have seen 640,000 tonnes per year in NGO reports and media. That figure is widely considered outdated: it was a rough 1970s-era extrapolation that was repeated without its original caveats.
More recent research gives smaller but better-grounded numbers. Wilcox et al. (2021) used satellite observations of industrial fishing to estimate plastic gear lost during use at roughly 48,000 tonnes per year (median), with an upper range near 100,000 tonnes — excluding gear deliberately abandoned at end of life.
We use 100,000 metric tons as a round, conservative headline figure in the same order of magnitude as that industrial-fishing analysis. Richardson et al. (2022) interviewed fishers globally and found nearly 2% of deployed gear is lost each year — nets, lines, pots, and traps — but converting that to tonnes depends on gear type and is still uncertain at global scale.
Ghost gear keeps ghost fishing: entangling and killing marine life long after boats leave. It is also a major source of plastic pollution in the ocean.
What this number does not capture
- The old 640,000 t estimate — we deliberately avoid it because it is not empirically supported.
- All abandoned gear at port — some studies focus only on gear lost while fishing, not deliberate discard.
- Small-scale and unreported fisheries — satellite-based estimates skew toward industrial fleets; total losses may be higher.
Why we show it anyway
Lost nets and lines are out of sight but not harmless. A defensible lower-bound estimate is more honest than a shocking number that scientists no longer stand behind. Read this counter as a proportional share of a recent research-based estimate, not a verified daily loss log.
Further reading
- Plastic gear loss from industrial fishing (Wilcox et al., Fish and Fisheries)
- Global estimates of fishing gear lost (Richardson et al., 2022)
- Challenges around global fishing gear loss estimates (Fish and Fisheries)